Organizations are increasingly using workplace collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack. With the proliferation of these tools, litigants are now seeking in discovery-relevant messages from collaboration tools. Over the past year, several courts have issued orders addressing preservation and production obligations for relevant content from those tools. The cases are instructive on how organizations should structure the use and configuration of retention settings for those tools as part of their information governance strategy.
Instant Messaging Cases
Some insightful cases dealing with these issues arise in the context of corporate instant messaging programs like Microsoft Lync, Skype, and Cisco Jabber. For example, King v. Catholic Health Initiatives involved questions regarding the production of relevant messages from Lync as well as relevant emails. Defendant had neglected to preserve active copies of the emails in question when it failed to suspend its 30 day retention policy for “non-essential correspondence” after a duty to preserve attached. The court ordered defendant to retrieve a backup copy of the alleged harasser’s email account.
